For many, today is the start of a holiday break and we wish you "Happy Holidays". This week's news includes both Google and Microsoft closures, an IDE for Go from JetBrains, and a massive robot. Book-wise, we have added to Programmer's Bookshelf with recommended JavaScript titles at advanced level. From our history section we look back at the UK Micros of the 1980s.

Nikos Vaggalis gives an full 5-star rating and his review does a lot more than outline the contents of the book and reveals his enthusiasm for both regular expressions and Perl 6 which he describes as: a magnificent language whose depth is only starting to emerge.

Sue Gee awards this book 4.5 out of 5 and the reason for any reservation is that from the title you might expect to read more about Grace Hopper herself. In fact it cover many other pioneers of hardware and software and about the machines and technologies they pioneered, as suggested by the subtitle. Highly recommended to anyone interested in history of computing/

News

The one-line verdict from a survey into the State of JavaScript 2017 is that the JavaScript world is richer and messier than ever. A wealth of detail is available from the results, which are presented as interactive charts plus Random Comments, and here are some highlights.

The holiday season is recognized as a good time to announce that popular APIs and features have been dropped. I don't think that Microsoft's dropping of the HomeGroup feature in Windows 10 was deliberately timed, but it does add to the list of announcements.

This is a clever idea that solves the real problem of the IoT - creating sensors that can work without being hardwired to anything. It is difficult to know how practical this approach is but it deserves und erstanding because it not only eliminates the need for a battery but for any electronics at all.

JetBrains has released a Go IDE built on top of the IntelliJ Platform, and changed its name from Gogland to GoLand. The new IDE adds coding assistance and integration for Go on IntelliJ in a similar way to PyCharm for Python or IntelliJIDEA for Java.

The latest version of HTML, version 5.2, is now a W3C Recommendation. This makes the existing HTML 5.1 recommendation obsolete, with HTML 5.2 now the official web standard, with support for JavaScript modules and better handling of online commerce.

Microsoft is considering providing Python as a scripting language in Excel and is asking for feedback from the developer community. If you'd like this to happen speak up now - and if you have a different idea contribute to the discussion.

Google has confirmed that it is opening an AI center in Beijing. The new lab, which will be led by Fei-Fei Li and Jia Li, has already recruited some team members and there are more than 20 jobs currently open.

Professional Programmer

JavaScript is the most popular language for open source projects, but it is one that suffers from its very name. It is often misunderstood simply because of the inclusion of "script" in its name. Yes, it can be used as a scripting language - but that's just part of its role. It also doesn't do objects in the way that its namesake Java does, and this makes it even more missunderstood.

History

Something special happened in the UK at the start of the 1980s and it altered the face of computing as we know it. You may be of the opinion that all that ever happened in the past was Apple and IBM, but not so, not in the UK at least - there was an explosion of machines unlike any other before or since.